Crypto Coin Listings Exploded in 2021
In the first half of 2021 data aggregator CoinMarketCap added 2,655 new crypto assets to its database, bringing the total number of listed coins to 10,810, according to data shared with CoinDesk.
For perspective, in 2018, during the peak of the initial coin offering (ICO) boom, CoinMarketCap listed its 2,000th asset on its website.
This year “saw a Cambrian explosion of new crypto assets largely as a consequence of several tailwinds,” said Aaron Khoo, head of listings at CoinMarketCap, referring to the evolutionary event that took place 541 million years ago when large numbers of new organisms seemingly burst into existence.
Subscribe to , By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms & conditions and privacy policy
Like CoinMarketCap, two other data aggregators also added 2,000 or more new assets to their databases in 2021. Singapore-headquartered CoinGecko listed 3,064 new assets on its website while the smaller, Poland-based crypto data and research platform Coinpaprika listed 2,000 new assets. Wojciech Maciejewski, business development manager at Coinpaprika, said the platform is currently inundated with new applications for coin listings.
“We don’t have enough people to go through all the applications,” Maciejewski said.
Representatives from CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko and Coinpaprika agree the 2021 surge in new crypto assets is driven by a combination of bullish price action, the influx of traditional financial institutions, influencers and celebrities to the space, along with the non-fungible token (NFT) boom and the rise of meme coins like dogecoin, shiba and safemoon.
But this is not the first time the crypto space has witnessed a dramatic surge in new assets. After the initial coin offering (ICO) boom kicked off in 2017, new crypto assets poured into the market much in the same way. However, more than three-quarters of those ICOs turned out to be scams, while almost half failed to raise funds.
And if history’s any indicator, of the thousands of new crypto assets that have exploded onto the market in 2021, only a few will survive.
“We have no data to back that but the expectation is that [the new assets] are more or less similar to the 2017 ICO round where only a handful managed to stick around after the initial craze,” Sze Jin Teh, principal product manager at CoinGecko, said in an email.
Behind the numbers
Between 2014 and 2021, almost 16,000 crypto assets were created, according to data from CoinGecko.
But this number includes all coins, both active as well as inactive assets (assets attached to disrupted projects).
For instance, according to Maciejewski, active assets on Coinpaprika account for around half of the 6,342 assets listed on the site.
And a portion of these deactivated crypto assets were born out of the ICO boom.
Data shared by CoinGecko reveal roughly 16,000 crypto assets were created in the last 6.5 years. (Shuai Hao/CoinDesk Research ) Source: CoinGecko
CoinGecko, for instance, recorded its monthly high for the number of new coins listed on its platform in 2017, according to data shared with CoinDesk. The platform listed 914 assets in December 2017 alone.
According to Kristian Kho, operations lead at CoinGecko, December 2017 was the peak of the ICO craze when retail interest in crypto rose, coinciding with the all-time high bitcoin price at the time. “This was the first time we saw a rush of a new class of tokens being created to capitalize on the success of the first few trailblazers (Filecoin, Tezos, EOS and the like). We even created a dedicated ICO page to track all the ongoing ICOs back then,” Kho said. But a majority of those tokens were short-lived.
“Many of the projects that had raised funds simply dissolved upon exhausting their runways,” said Kho.
But Jin said even more coins have popped up this time around compared to 2017, and across multiple chains including Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain.
“There are more and more new ideas, but also more scams that we have to inform our users of,” Maciejewski said, adding that Coinpaprika is receiving up to seven times more requests than it did in 2018.
And these staggering numbers still don’t reflect the total amount of crypto assets floating around the internet.
“The coins listed on CoinMarketCap represent a thin sliver (~20% approval rate) of the total number of new coin applications,” Khoo said in an email to CoinDesk.
According to Khoo, during the first half of 2021, CoinMarketCap received a whopping 10,793 applications from crypto projects and companies seeking to have their new assets listed.
The vetting process
To face the rising numbers of crypto assets and listing applications, each listing platform has its own set of criteria for approving a new asset.
CoinMarketCap reviews an extensive list of metrics shared on its website, but according to Khoo, there is also an element of competitive benchmarking, by comparing the asset to other, similar applicants.
“Listing evaluation by CoinGecko is done holistically with a set of internal criteria used to evaluate each coin. The exact listing criteria are not disclosed to prevent manipulation by the project team,” Kho said in a written statement.
But both platforms, along with Coinpaprika, look closely at the coin’s active trading volume and liquidity, along with other factors including social media presence, community attitude towards the coin and the team behind the project.
According to CoinGecko’s Kho, the rise of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), where the listing is permissionless and fees are low, has made it even easier to create and market coins. This means anyone can tokenize anything, fuelling the strange new world of meme coins, Kho said. “In light of this, CoinGecko has become much stricter in listing new tokens. This is because the instances of scam coins have increased with the rise of DEXs,” Kho said.
Currently, Coinpaprika accepts 95% of requests for assets already listed on centralized exchanges like Binance or Coinbase, discarding only incomplete applications. But when it comes to DEXs, the acceptance rate drops to around 60% or 70% because they do not typically have stable or reliable API endpoints (communication channels) due to their decentralized nature.
Meme coin rush
According to Kho, the highest percentage of applications received at CoinGecko are for meme coins.
“The popularity and price increase of meme coins such as dogecoin and shiba inu coin has inspired many to come up with their own derivative meme coins in the hopes of capturing the success of the former two,” Kho said.
He added that the ease of creating a simple token allows anyone to launch a meme coin, and with it apply for listing at CoinGecko.
“In the last quarter, meme coins (especially those of the canine variety) dominated new coin applications, accounting for roughly three out of four new applications,” Khoo from CoinMarketCap said in an email to CoinDesk.
He also said that in keeping with the meteoric rise of Axie Infinity, a game partly owned and operated by its players, CoinMarketCap is witnessing a modest uptick in NFTs and gaming coins.
But 2021’s meme coins appear to be the assets that most resemble 2017’s ICO tokens in terms of quantity and longevity.
“Meme tokens tend to be ephemeral, and I’d say that approximately 75% of them meet a quick death if they do not go viral within the first few months,” Khoo said.
He explained that the biggest determinants of failure are a hastily cobbled-together team looking to make a quick buck and the absence of true believers rallying around a common cause within the coins’ respective communities.
But it’s still too early to tell the fate of the nascent crypto assets that have just joined the market, according to Kho.
From the Senate’s infrastructure bill to Ethereum’s major upgrade: 5 key things that happened in crypto this past week
As the Senate continues to debate crypto tax provisions within the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, bitcoin and ether are surging. The price of bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, surpassed $46,000 on Monday morning, while the price of ether jumped over $3,000. As of 2:00 p.m. EST, bitcoin is trading at around $45,950 and ether is trading at around $3,150. In addition to the infrastructure bill proposal, here are five things that happened in crypto this past week.
- The NFT market continues to boom
Over the past week, the market for NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, surged. OpenSea, one of the largest marketplaces for NFTs, surpassed $428 million in trading volume in the last seven days alone, according to DappRadar. Within that period, CryptoPunk and Axie Infinity collectibles made up a significant volume of trading, accounting for over $134 million and over $220 million, respectively.
- The new SEC chair says the crypto industry needs more investor protection
The new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler made headlines last week after sharing his stance on crypto regulation. “While I’m neutral on the technology, even intrigued … I’m not neutral about investor protection,” Gensler told Bloomberg on Tuesday. “If somebody wants to speculate, that’s their choice, but we have a role as a nation to protect those investors against fraud.” Gensler also alluded to plans to regulate crypto exchanges and decentralized finance, or DeFi, platforms during his speech at the Aspen Security Forum on Tuesday. “I’m pro innovation, but we also need rules of the road,” Gensler told CNBC on Wednesday.
- Ethereum’s major London upgrade went live
Currently, users must bid for how much they’re willing to pay to have their ether transaction picked up by a miner, which can be extremely costly. Under EIP-1559, this process will be handled by an automated bidding system with a set fee amount that fluctuates based on how congested the network is. Another major change under EIP-1559 is that part of every transaction fee will be burned, or removed from circulation, which will begin to reduce the supply of ether and potentially boost its price. EIP-1559 won’t lower gas fee prices or the cost of transactions on the network, which can be very high. But the upgrade is important since it has the potential to improve Ethereum’s user experience, will reduce the supply of ether and may boost its price.
- Binance.US CEO resigns
On Friday, Brian Brooks resigned as CEO of Binance.US, the U.S. affiliate of crypto exchange Binance, after three months in the role. “Greetings #crypto community. Letting you all know that I have resigned as CEO of @BinanceUS. Despite differences over strategic direction, I wish my former colleagues much success,” Brooks, a former top U.S. banking regulator, tweeted. Recently, Binance has been at the center of compliance setbacks and regulatory scrutiny within the U.S. and around the globe, but it is not clear whether this impacted Brooks' decision to step down.
- Crypto advocates lobby Senate’s infrastructure bill
Effective crypto regulation takes time and caution. Here’s why
Premature regulation can chill innovation and create unexpected outcomes.
Caution, collaboration and neutrality are needed when approaching crypto regulation.
The United States Congress is in the process of negotiating a bipartisan infrastructure bill with the hopes of passing sweeping legislation that will invest in areas such as transportation, climate initiatives, and broadband access. Buried within the text, though, was something seemingly unrelated: a proposal related to taxing cryptocurrencies.
We won’t get into the details of the proposal and the corresponding amendments (you can read more about that here if you’re interested). We’ll instead put our focus squarely on a topic not often taken to heart: premature regulation.
To start, let us establish that we are not anti-regulation. At the World Economic Forum, a big part of our role is working directly with a global set of stakeholders, including policymakers and regulators, to assess how to accelerate the benefits of technology and mitigate its risks. We are not naïve and nor do we deny that there are risks with any new technology and its evolution. With this, crypto is no exception.
This attitude is reflected in much of the crypto community at-large. Leaders across business, innovation and civil society recognize the role regulation and policy makers can play. We’ve seen leaders in the sector explicitly welcoming regulatory clarity. Initiatives like the recently-established DeFi Education Fund (DEF) reflect the industry’s desire to support the education of government actors on these complicated topics.
But progress on this front cannot – and should not – happen overnight.
The past decade or so has provided deep insight into the shortcomings of the financial system as it stands. In the United States and globally, we have seen the consequences of increasing inequality, stagnant growth, and a lack of transparency. In some cases, the result has been disillusionment and resignation. In others, we’ve seen large-scale civil unrest.
At a minimum, there are aspects of the current financial system and the regulations surrounding it that are not working for people all over the world, including in the United States. Such a situation requires self-reflection and investigation into what’s gone wrong – and how to think creatively about new capabilities and resources. This approach is key to avoid diving headfirst into potentially re-creating or exacerbating the problems of the past.
“Failing to sift through the distinctions - and regulate accordingly - could significantly stifle innovation and progress.”
This is especially a concern with cryptocurrency, where the technology is generally poorly understood by the average person. It isn’t anyone’s fault – the space is relatively new and growing rapidly. It’s truly a full-time job to stay on top of it all. Crypto is one of many new areas that policymakers and regulators are juggling, which can make it difficult to fully understand the nuances of the technology and services within the space.
That is why it is critically important to proceed with caution around these questions, ensuring that there’s enough time to get up to speed on these incredibly complex and novel issues. Take, for example, the emerging space of decentralized finance, which builds a variety of financial services on top of blockchain technology.
Decentralized Finance Policy-Maker Toolkit Image: World Economic Forum
As the graphic above shows, though they are grouped together for obvious reasons, DeFi services are not monolithic. They represent various parts of the technical stack, varying objectives, and services, and have different interactions with other services within the space. At the same time, DeFi is explicitly not the same as traditional finance, though there may be some similarities and overlap. Failing to sift through the distinctions and regulate accordingly could significantly stifle innovation and progress.
Here are some principles for policymakers and regulators to keep in mind as they proceed down this path:
Don’t rush into regulation: Regulation can add value when it is carefully considered, evaluated, and weighed. Legislative rulemaking is usually a slow process for a reason.
Regulation can add value when it is carefully considered, evaluated, and weighed. Legislative rulemaking is usually a slow process for a reason. Don’t shy away from industry: Many industry players are lucid about the potential risks within the space. Honest projects welcome clarity and seek to avoid mishaps down the road. Dialogue between the public and private sectors can be extremely useful and have – in our experience – resulted in action-oriented outputs like the DeFi Policy-Maker Toolkit and the CBDC Policy-Maker Toolkit.
Many industry players are lucid about the potential risks within the space. Honest projects welcome clarity and seek to avoid mishaps down the road. Dialogue between the public and private sectors can be extremely useful and have – in our experience – resulted in action-oriented outputs like the DeFi Policy-Maker Toolkit and the CBDC Policy-Maker Toolkit. Tech neutrality is essential: Regulating the underlying technology itself, especially in a space that is changing as quickly as crypto, may be a fast path to unintentionally anointing winners that may or may not be the optimal choice for constituents. Being technology neutral has always been a core principle of policymaking for this reason, and this approach isn’t something that demands change at this point in time.